Chess has become more and more popular, drawing the attention of many players, including children and young people, who start to learn and practice it as a sport. But chess isn’t simple and everybody knows that. If you want to become a master you need to work very hard on it and most of all, you have to practice. There are sports clubs where you can train yourself with other people who work on improving their skills in chess, or you can find a fried who likes it just as much as you do. But what happens if you don’t?


People have come up with a great idea, they have invented computer programs that play chess. It is called computer chess, and it contains both hardware and software which allows the computer to play chess autonomously, without help from human. The reasons behind computer chess is entertainment, foe people to be able to play when they don’t have a partner available, as research for human cognition, for computer games competitions and also as help for chess analysis.


Computer chess has been available since the 70s, and it is affordable for everybody today. There are several chess engines that are even free to be downloaded from the internet, which really eases its use. The top programs (Shredder& Fritz) are so well developed that have even beaten the grand master in chess, which is the best player in the world. The best computer programs are run from very strong PCs. For example, ELO is an international system that measures the strength of a player. The best human ELO score is 2820, whilst computer chess programs have more than 3000 ELO, which makes it easy to guess who usually wins in competitions between computer and humans. Computers operate with deep calculations and many of their moves can’t be understood by humans immediately, which usually allow them to win in the end. But there are times when humans are superior, and this is mostly because computers neglect position, being too greedy, if we may call it that. There are two main elements when it comes to chess: the static, referring to the material, the pieces, and then the dynamic, referring to the position. The computer pays more attention to the static and losses sight of the dynamic, which allows people to win. When it comes to the competition between computer and human chess players, there is no general rules in regards to who will win, it only depends on the player and the computer.


In the 60s and 70s it was easy for people to play and win against computers, but computers programs have developed, becoming better and it is now much more difficult to beat the machine. Situation has changed into the 90s, when the computer systems have overtaken the human chess champions. And I consider it a paradox, for humans to be beaten out by the machines that they themselves have created.